1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus which transmits a Web page in response to a request sent from a terminal, and, in particular, to information processing apparatus which provides information concerning a state of processing requested from the terminal.
Moreover, the present invention relates to a service providing apparatus which provides a predetermined service based on a request sent from the above-mentioned information processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
By development of the Internet technology, a Web page provided by a Web browser acts not only as an information providing part but also as an application providing part in recent years. As main technology for operating a Web page as an application providing part, there are an ASP (Active Server Pages: registered trademark), a JSP (Java (registered trademark) Server Pages), a servlet, a CGI (Common Gateway Interface), etc. Although these have various differences in details, each executes a program in response to a request given by a Web browser, and they are common as being a technology for generating a processing result in a form of a Web page.
The program performed in such a case can also transmits a processing request to another server which also provides a service to the network, and can generate a Web page also based on information obtained therefrom in response to the processing request. Such a Web server can acts as a relay part, and, thus, can provide via a Web page not only services which the relevant server originally have but also services which are provided by various other servers.
However, in some case, a time is required for completing requested processing, and, in such a case, a Web server cannot make a response to the Web browser until the processing is completed. Then, until then, the Web browser should wait for a response from the Web server. Then, a user cannot perform any other operation with the same Web browser, and, thus, inconvenience may occur. In order to solve this problem, there is a method in which, for a program for which a time is expected to be taken, a setting is made previously such that a response is made to a Web browser even before the processing is completed, in other words, a response is made asynchronously. By this method, it becomes possible to solve a problem that a long time is taken until a user receives a response. However, the user may not obtain a result of the processing in this case.